


Leviathan

by Todesengel



Series: Social Contract [1]
Category: Kagaku Ninja Tai Gatchaman | Science Ninja Team Gatchaman
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Cybernetic Implants, Gen, Mad Science, Masturbation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-08-15
Updated: 2011-08-15
Packaged: 2017-10-22 15:36:16
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,804
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/239599
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Todesengel/pseuds/Todesengel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He never asked to remember this</p>
            </blockquote>





	Leviathan

The first time he woke, he knew nothing except that he hurt. His world was pain and as far as he knew, that was the only world he had.

That didn't mean he liked it though.

He had no words -- no words at all, no means to express himself, no means of sorting, organizing the scrambled mess inside his head -- and so he grunted, whined, made wet, desperate noises to protest the pain. A shape loomed over him, features blanked out by the burning bright light above him. Sound issued forth -- meaningless noise, that made him fret more, made him struggle harder to make it understood that he wanted the pain to stop, now, please.

Something touched his arm, and then he felt a tiny prick, cold and sharp and small, but no less painful for that fact, frostbite on fire.

He howled his protest.

Darkness spun up around him, and he fell into it, fell down and down and down until there was no pain, there was nothing, no world, no life.

He slept.

*

The second time he woke, he knew his name, but precious little else. The world was blurry before his eyes, and he blinked and turned on the soft ( _too soft,_ his mind whispered to him) mattress. His movement begat more movement, and once more a shape slid into his field of vision. Blurred white and blue and his mouth reacted before his brain could, croaked out a soft, "Ken?"

But, no, the blurred figure resolved into a man in a long white coat ( _doctor_ ), a man with gray at the temples ( _old, don't know him_ ) and a gentle smile but cold eyes. ( _not Ken? who's -- where? -- what's going on?_ )

"Ah, the sleeping beauty awakes." The man's smile broadened, but his eyes didn't warm. " _Buona sera, Giorgio._ "

"'S not my name." He licked his lips -- they were dry, chapped. His mouth felt heavy and slow. Forming the right words was hard ( _never did like talking_ ), and he spoke slowly, stutteringly. "Joe. 'M Joe. Who're you?"

"You don't remember me? I'm hurt." The man sat down in a chair, and Joe forced his head to turn, forced himself to track the movement. "You used to call me ' _Zio Rafi_ '. I used to bounce you on my knee."

"Don' rem'm'er." He licked his lips again. Everything felt so heavy ( _not good. drugs?_ ) "Wha' happ'n'd?"

"Ah. I was afraid of this." The smile vanished and a small frown appeared, brow furrowing to form a small line between his eyebrows. "You were in a terrible accident, Giorgio. You've been hurt very, very badly; you were unconscious for a very long time. Your accident has damaged your memory." The man smiled again. "But don't worry. We'll make you better. Just trust me, trust your Uncle Rafi. We'll make you whole again."

He nodded, slowly. His eyes were heavy, and he wanted to sleep. He struggled to stay awake.

"Joe." ( _don't trust, lying_ ) "I'm Joe."

*

A week later they took him to a different room when they came for him in morning, and in the mental map he was beginning to construct out of a habit that came from one of the dark, closed off places in his mind, Joe placed it as one floor below the room with all of the weights. Corridor after endless corridor, and they all looked the same except for the stripes of paint near the floor. Three colors here -- blue, green, yellow -- and Joe wondered if there was some order, some code to the color combinations, or if they were just randomly assigned. He was still thinking about that when the nurse -- a stout, grizzled matron who seemed to take an excessive amount of pleasure in poking him with needles -- opened the door and gestured for him to enter.

The room contained a chair ( _electrical chair_ ) with padded armrests and leather straps and something strange looming over it, a frightening crown. Joe stopped, began to back away. ( _run. gotta get away_ )

"No fucking way," he said, and a part of him was disgusted with the way he was acting, but mostly he was afraid. He remembered pain, even if he remembered nothing else, and he knew that he didn't like it, and that chair looked like its only purpose was to bring pain.

"It's okay, Joe. This will help you." The doctor's voice was distorted by static. It brought no comfort, and Joe continued to back away, slowly, falteringly, his legs stiffly obeying the frantic commands of his mind.

"'M not sitting there."

"Nurse, fetch an orderly."

Panic made his heart thunder, made the blood rush in his ears. Two burly men grabbed his arms, dragged him forward, deaf to his protests. The nurse strapped him in, shoved something between his teeth. ( _tastes like rubber_ ) The scissors she used to cut away the simple clothes he'd been given felt strangely cold. He closed his eyes, strained up against the leather straps as hard as he could, strained until he felt tears welling in the corners of his eyes and his heart felt like it would burst, and he fell back, panting around the rubber bit. Dimly he heard the doctor's voice trying to reassure him, telling him that they were trying to help him, that this would bring back his memories, that he'd only hurt himself if he struggled. He shook his head, tried to speak, and then the pain began and he could only scream.

It felt as though he was being flayed, like he was dying, like he was being turned inside out, burned alive, buried, drowned, dissected and still conscious. He screamed until his throat gave out, thrashed against the bindings that held him to the chair, body convulsing.

And then it was over.

Sweat poured off of him, soaked into the padding on the chair. He teetered on the edge of darkness, exhausted, still hurting, and his mind was filled with a confusion of noise and sound and sight and smell, with memories jumbled and fragmented, thrown together like the pieces of a thousand different jigsaw puzzles.

Large hands unbuckled the restraints, urged him up. He took a few tottering steps. Fell to his knees. Was violently sick.

"Schedule the next treatment for two days from now."

Joe passed out while trying to give the doctor the finger, and when he woke up he was lying on the bed in his room, naked and clean, his hair still damp, and his mind still full of the fragmented memories. He closed his eyes, and slowly, slowly, the memories fell into line.

The first thing he noticed was that he'd apparently spent most of his life around cars, around stock cars. ( _raced them, loved them_ ) Driving cars, sitting in cars, crashing cars, fixing cars hands all covered with grease and oil and the engine sitting before him in all its parts. The feel of an engine in tune humming through his body, of wind whipping past his face, of gravity and velocity working their separate forces on his body. The smell of gasoline; of oil; of coolant; of rubber burning. Squealing tires. Static from the radio. Static from an announcer, an intrusion from the outside into this world of metal and plastic, of gears and pedals and axles.

The memory of a car wreck fascinated him, and in the darkness behind his eyes he could almost feel himself being thrown against the safety harness, teeth rattling, head slamming against the padded headrest; could see the world outside his window flip over and over, feel the first licks of heat from the fire, the scrape of shattered glass along his body as he pulled himself free, hear the ringing in his ears that made everything sound so dull.

Was that why he was here? Some horrendous car crash, some accident out on the racetrack, some fallout from a reckless action?

Joe probed at the black emptiness that filled most of his mind, but if it held the answer to that question, then it wasn't giving it up. There was so much he didn't know, so much that came from an instinct that he couldn't recognize, sprang out of a source he couldn't name, and so in the mental landscape that existed behind his eyes, Joe ran back to the few, bright, memories he could see. But even these held more questions than answers.

Like the four people who kept showing up again and again, sometimes in ones or twos, sometimes as a group, usually at a bar that felt like home. He knew the faces, knew that these were friends -- or at least friendly people -- and yet their names slid from his grip like water through his fingers. He frowned, struggled to find something concrete about them. Find some context that would tell him who they were, what role they played for him.

He felt like he knew them so well. Felt like he knew everything there was to know. And yet they were strangers to him. Empty. Blank. Form without meaning.

They made him feel--

Confused, for the most part. They called up heavy, tangled emotions that made his throat catch. Trust and annoyance, loyalty and resentment, anger, shame, fear (but not of them, fear of something else, brought on by something else and yet so inextricably tied to these four), intimacy, relief, pride, love, disgust.

He worried at the memories, turned them over and over in his mind, noted every detail until they began to blur, their distinct edges growing soft, bleeding together like cheap dye.

Joe sighed, opened his eyes, and in the blinding glare of the overhead ( _fuck, no, not again, please, not this again_ ) he saw a fist aiming for his face, and he flinched away, cried out, until he realized that it was a memory, nothing more. A memory of a fight in an alley, a memory of being thrown against a chain-link fence, ( _rusty, had to get a tetanus shot_ ) of being afraid, of being angry, of being hurt, of hurting. Of shouting. Of having a man -- one of the four, the one who made him feel the most confusion -- with a knee in the small of his back, voice rough and harsh and broken with panting.

 _"Goddamnit, Joe, just let us help you."_

 _"Fuck you, Ken. Just mind your own fucking business."_

Joe flung his arm across his eyes, stared at the pale imperfection of his skin. He felt warm, suffused with warmth, awash with warmth, with happiness, with a giddy glee that made him nearly hysterical until he bit his tongue to keep himself from laughing.

He had a name.

He had something solid. Something real. Some aspect, some fact that brought him closer to the man he was before, closer to these familiar strangers.

"Ken," he whispered, rolling the name in his mouth, tasting it, savoring it. Brought forth another memory of this man, of Ken, a friendlier one, drinking beer and watching -- something, some unimportant thing on a small television with one badly bent antenna.

"Ken," he said again, burning that name to that face, to the welter of emotions, to the sensation of a cold beer in his hand and comfort in his heart.

Ken. ( _fucking pain in the ass, help me, please, god, help me Ken, I need you_ )

His anchor. His bridge. His tie between this world and that other one, the one that lived in his head.

Joe blinked, slowly, rubbed at his eyes with a hand that felt like it weighed a thousand pounds. Yawned until his jaw cracked. Flexed his fingers, felt the ache of his body subside, a little.

The pain wasn't so bad. He could endure it.

*

Joe rediscovered sex on the third day of the treatments, when they let him shower on his own for the first time. He'd scrubbed his body down awkwardly -- he did everything awkwardly, stiffly, heavily -- and as his hand wrapped around his dick he felt...remembrance.

Familiarity.

He'd stroked, and the sudden, unexpected burst of pleasure made him sag against the slick tiles of the shower stall.

" _Dio,_ " he hissed out, chest constricting as he stroked himself again and again. Water ran into his mouth and he swallowed, convulsively, tasted soap and didn't care. "Ahh. Fuck."

He closed his eyes and a world of images spun before him, grabbed him.

Women.

Blonds.

Brunettes.

Two redheads, at the same time. ( _ahh, so good, the twins_ )

Ten -- twenty -- fifty -- a hundred -- too many to count. To many to keep track of. All different, all beneath him or above him, hot, slick, sweat that tasted like perfume and skin, like freedom, like death, like madness. His hand tightened. His body tightened. The movie played on, kisses and fucking, fucking and no kisses, hate mixed with love mixed with sex mixed with wanting, aching, yearning, unfulfilled. Dancing in a bar, flashing lights, breasts pressed against his back, his front, and laughing, laughing, laughing, and then bumping in the darkness, and falling, falling, tripping, blind fumbling and ah, God, he _remembered_ , he knew that sensation, those were his hands that reached out, unfastened, caressed; his lips that bent down and pressed soft kisses against a soft throat, felt the erratic beat of lust and need, dove down, down, down that soft, warm, willing body. He knew what came next, knew that he'd had a headache the next day and had barely had enough cash on him that morning to catch a cab home, had meant to call her and never did because --

Because --

There was nothing more.

Just the girl, and him, and the blankness that surrounded the moment.

But it was enough.

His hand tightened, his body tightened, his mind held fast to that clear moment and he came.

He came, and he didn't cry out ( _they're watching, don't let them know_ ) because his throat wouldn't let him, and his body wouldn't let him, and so it was more of a whisper when he said "Ken", the name strangled and intertwined with his orgasm, drowned out by his heartbeat.

He let the water wash his body clean.

*

The first memory of killing came when he was tired and angry and confused ( _scared_ ) and annoyed at having to do yet another of "Uncle Rafi's" tests. The memory sprang on him uninvited, darkness and excitement and arousal and rage. Oh he was angry. He burned with his anger, burned so bright that he burned like darkness.

Tension.

Tension in his body, in his mind, in the air, tension that was sweet, that hummed, that cut him like a wire. A voice, crackling in his ear, "Hold your position, Joe, do you copy? Hold your fucking position." ( _so bothersome, knew how to do the job_ )

He hadn't waited. ( _they'd been made, had to help, needed a distraction_ ) And there had been two soldiers. One had been young. He remembered the blood on his hands. He remembered how warm he had felt, how sated.

How good the fucking had been.

How much he wanted to kill again.

The doctor found him curled up in a corner, slowly hitting his head against the wall.

"I'm not like that," he was whispering to himself. "I'm not like that. I'm not a monster."

"Gior-- Joe. Tell me what happened." The doctor gestured for one of the orderlies, signed for him to prepare a syringe. Joe caught the movement, tensed in anticipation.

"What did I do?" He looked up, and the tears had made his eyes puffy and sore and gave a halo to the world. "What did I do before?"

"Are you remembering?" Joe nodded, and the doctor frowned involuntarily. He composed his face, made his voice soothing. "Tell me."

"No." Joe unclasped his hands, gripped the doctor's arm tightly. "Tell me what I did."

"Let go, Joe." The doctor's face was pale. "You're hurting me."

Joe let go. Looked at his hand as if it belonged to someone else. Turned away, turned his face into the wall. "I'm not him. I'm not that monster."

"No, _caro_ , no." The doctor edged closer, and although Joe's body hummed at his touch, whined like a bowstring drawn back and waiting for the command to attack, he did nothing else. "No," the doc whispered again. "You're a good man. An angel."

*

He figured it out a few weeks later, when he could stay awake for more than a few hours and was just starting to feel restless when put back into his room for the night instead of pathetically grateful for the chance to drag his tired body back to the bed and lie down.

He figured it out after the latest session in the chair thrust the memory of his death ( _god, are they safe, did they make it?_ ) into his mostly unprepared mind, the memory slotting into place between the two lives he'd seemed to live -- the Adrenaline Junkie and the Psychopath as he'd come to think of them.

He figured it out, and no amount of lying to himself could convince him that this was anything but truth.

He had died, and yet now he lived, and there was enough of his old life put back in the old familiar places that he could recognize the sound of a machine purring in perfect order. He could tell, now, that his body wasn't his; it was a good reproduction, but it was only a copy, after all, and too stiff and unresponsive to be _his_ body. _His_ body had always obeyed him, ( _liar_ ) never stuttered into action, never hesitated over the orders relayed from his brain.

He was a machine, ( _always was_ ) a simulacrum, an imposter pretending to be Joe Asakura. Pretending to be human.

But questions of metaphysics aside, the point was Joe had figured it out. He'd taken all of the disparate pieces of evidence and put them together, and come up with the only truth.

Of course, the fact that he put his fist two feet into a concrete wall and the only thing damaged was the wall may have played a part in his revelation.

He did it again, just because he could, and when the doc came into his room, Joe stepped aside and showed him his handiwork.

"Why," he asked, some secret part of him whispering that now was not the time to get angry, to fly off the handle. They'd brought him back from the dead, and it was more important to know why they did that then to get angry about it, at least right now.

Later though.

Oh, later he'd let the Psychopath out to play; admit fully and freely that that life was his just as much as the adrenaline junkie. He'd have to -- the black hatred that clouded his vision would allow no dissembling on that point.

The doc looked at the holes, at Joe's hand, coated in a fine dusting of concrete. Looked up, face expressionless. "So you figured it out."

"Why," Joe asked again, grated out the words. "Why me? Why," he gestured, tight, controlled, on the edge of violence, "this."

"You were clinically dead for nearly a day, and your body was too weak -- too damaged -- as it was. We had no other choice."

"You didn't answer my question. Why. Me."

"Because you were the first to die."

Cold, clinical words, and they echoed in Joe's mind a few days later after he got three hard memories of the Psychopath, three complete moments of that life, and it was just enough to give him the outline of the War of Epic Proportions. Enough to know that he had enemies he couldn't always spot, dangers he couldn't foresee, that there were guys out there who'd fuck him over in ways that were worse than anything he could imagine right now ( _god, it hurt, it hurt_ ) just because he wasn't one of Them, because he was an Us.

Joe remembered those words, thought about everything that had happened to him here -- the sessions in the chair, the lies, the way nobody would tell him a fucking thing -- and it was evidence enough that he was in the hands of Them and they wanted him. Wanted him pretty fucking badly if they reanimated his bloodied corpse, wanted him willing. Wanted him to fight for Them, to kill Us.

That was when Joe stopped. Stopped eating, stopped talking, stopped moving, stopped responding. He would have stopped breathing if he'd been able to.

He felt his body wind down as day after day he sat, still, motionless, trying to bottle up all of the violence that wanted him to lash out, to feel bones break under his fingers. Trying to bottle up the queasy sickness, too, at the thought of having to kill Us, at the thought of those four ( _ryujunjinpeiken_ ) dead, their blood on his hands. Or, worse, trapped here like he was, experimented on, forced into that chair, their names dragged out from him.

He wondered if he could die by doing nothing. Wondered if they'd let him.

On the seventh day, when the door opened and the doc came in, he was followed by a stranger. Joe let his eyes rest on the man, felt the faint stirrings of recognition, then looked away.

"I've brought someone to see you, Joe," the doc said in the false cheer he'd been affecting ever since he realized that screaming had absolutely no effect. Joe wondered how long it would take before the doc realized that this was just as worthless, that nothing would work; wondered how long it would take before they'd write him off as a lost cause, let him die.

He heard the doc sigh, distantly, the shift of clothing as he turned. "There. You see, Nambu? Nothing. He is most...obstinate."

The name rang bells in Joe's mind -- big bells, church bells, which sparked something else, some ancient memory that refused to surface -- and Joe looked at him again, sharper this time, more intently.

"Hello, G-2." That calm, meticulous voice; it made Joe straighten up out of subconscious obedience, then slouch down in subconscious insolence. "You're looking well."

"I know you." Joe narrowed his eyes, flipped through the files of memories he'd accumulated with each painful time in that chair. The face loomed before him -- with the Psychopath, which seemed oddly fitting -- one of Us, someone if not to be trusted then at least obeyed, albeit however grudgingly. Joe let his eyes narrow further, face mimicking his attempt to ferret out the 'why' of obedience.

He found it in one of the latest from the Psychopath, a memory of youth, of an institution and scientists, and a bracelet that he put on and whispered to and then had his world turned inside out and upside down and fucked six ways from Sunday. It had been --

Amazing. ( _terrifying_ )

That man ( _Hakase_ ) had been the one to give him this...gift. Had been the one to put the bracelet on him, to tell him the words.

Hakase smiled at him, the same cold smile as the doc's, obviously following along with Joe's thought process. "I understand you're not cooperating."

"Where are they?" A non-sequitur, but Joe had more important things on his mind than making sense. "Ke -- the others. Where are they?"

"Not here."

"But. They're all right?" Hakase nodded and a tension Joe had only been vaguely aware of slowly began to ease. "Let me see them."

"They think you're dead."

Joe laughed, a sharp, short bark that skirted the edge of humor. "Well. Of course. But, I'm not, am I." He leaned forward, and when he smiled there was an edge. "Why didn't you tell them?"

"We weren't sure it would work."

"Why won't you tell them?"

Hakase looked at him, and there might have been pity in his eyes; there might have been disgust; there might have been any number of things, but Joe couldn't tell, couldn't see past the glare of the lights on the lenses of his glasses. His words, though, were calm and steady, machine like, the voice of an institution.

"We aren't sure that it has."

*

The last time Joe sat in the chair, he hadn't known that it would be the last. He still had so many blank places, unnatural gaps, missing years -- everything from beyond his seventh birthday until the day they buried Ken's mom was gone, and Joe had the niggling suspicion that there were important moments in those four years. Important events that he had to remember, milestones that would give some sort of meaning, some sort of foundation, to his life.

And so he'd sat down in the chair, willingly, almost eagerly, let the nurse strap him in, took the rubber bit between his teeth, closed his eyes, opened himself up to the pain.

At first, the memories had been ordinary -- fighting with Ken, sleeping over at the Washio house, going to Venice with his folks, listening to his mother sing opera as she made dinner, playing bocce ball with his father. Simple things. Unimportant for the most part, yet still precious because they were clues to who he was. Doubly precious because they were normal, and so very little of what Joe _had_ remembered was normal.

And then he was on a beach. ( _no_ )

His parents hadn't been paying much attention to him, and he'd wandered off after a dog, a big golden retriever that had knocked him down into the surf, and would go tearing off after a tennis ball, a stick, his shoe. ( _no, not this, please_ )

His mother had called him. He'd turned back, dawdled a bit because his clothes were wet and covered in sand and he knew he was going to get scolded. ( _no, no, no, stop, don't do this_ )

When the Devil Star appeared, he'd thought she was beautiful. And then his mother had screamed "run" and he had, he'd run _toward_ them, filled with some vague notions of protecting his mother, of helping his father. ( _oh god, oh god_ )

She hadn't used a silencer; and her gun had been so very large. ( _sound like an engine backfiring, like fireworks going off to close_ )

He'd screamed when his father died, falling jerkily to the side like one of his toys tossed casually aside, face unrecognizable, blood and worse fountaining from the exit wound. Screamed again and again as he was splashed by blood and hair and brain. Stopped screaming when the Devil Star shot his mother, and started gagging instead, because he could taste her blood where it landed in his mouth. ( _salty, coppery, pennies dipped in salt_ )

He'd thrown up, then, vomiting his breakfast into the sand, shivering, so cold, so cold even though it was the middle of summer. The Devil Star had laughed at him, had cast a slim shadow over him, had leaned down and pulled his face up, twisted it from side to side. Had said, "Such a shame. You are such a pretty, pretty boy." ( _knew her voice, babysat for me once, one of Dad's assistants_ )

The bomb had been pressed into his hands like a present. Like oranges at Christmas. ( _warm, from her skin, smelled like gunpowder_ )

He'd been stunned, for a while, too stunned to realize what he held, to do anything, and then it was almost too late, and even though he'd hurled it from him as hard as he could, the bomb was still too close when it exploded; fire and metal and something had slammed into his head. The shockwave had sent him reeling, falling, tripping and he'd landed by his mother's body, had curled toward it in an unthinking search for comfort. ( _her body was still warm_ )

He didn't realize he was screaming, didn't realize that he was thrashing about, had bitten straight through rubber bit and into his tongue, had almost torn one of the restraints free, until he felt the cold bite of the needle in his arm, felt the seat stop humming beneath him.

Joe slumped down, let them think the sedative had taken hold, conserved his energy until after they'd unhooked him, after the orderlies had hoisted him upright. Then he struck, swift, efficient, a jab here, there, incapacitating blows, nothing more, they weren't the source of his anger.

He actually had to strain to tear the chair free from its moorings, had to work hard to swing it about and hurl it at the blank wall that hid the doctors from him. It hit the wall with a dull echo and bounced off.

"Take it back! Take it back! I don't want it, I don't want to remember that!" Blood dripped down his chin, tainted his words, and he threw the chair again. "If you can give me the memories, you can take them away!"

There was only silence, and Joe roared, incoherent noise, and threw the chair again and again, until it was nothing more than battered steel. He started to use his fists after that, slamming into the wall, crying and begging to forget, to never, ever, ever have to remember what his mother's blood tasted like, what it looked like to see his father's head explode.

He stopped only when blackness crept into the edges of his vision, when the nausea and pain told him he'd run out of energy. He looked up at the blankness, the wall barely damaged for all of his efforts.

"I didn't ask for this," he shouted.

Again, his answer was silence.

*

The whole talking to Ken thing started, as near as Joe could figure, right after that incident, which was really when he stopped thinking of the two lives he'd led as distinct, when everything melded into one and the majority of his life was back in his head once more. Most of it, but not all, and there were odd gaps, odd leaps, jerky motions of one moment to the next. Missions where he couldn't remember the ending, the middle, races where he didn't know if he won. Missing moments, and it created a...distance, a break between himself and the others, even if it was only in his mind. He didn't like it, and in the blank whiteness of his room, stripped clean of all the surveillance equipment he could find ( _don't think about how easy that was, how simple it was just to hear them humming away_ ) he tried to bridge that gap, tried to use his memories of Ken as a makeshift suture to draw their diverging lives back together.

He was fairly certain that it was sign that he was cracking up if he was having a conversation with a man who was fuck-knows how many miles away.

Joe didn't really care though.

"Can't get a fucking vacation even when you're dead. And what the hell have you guys been doing with out me to watch your asses? What've you done to my car? I swear to God Ken, if there's a scratch on her, I'll kick your ass so hard you won't be able to sit down for a week."

His words echoed in the empty space, but Joe was pretty sure that Ken would have rolled his eyes and reminded Joe that he was the one who usually needed someone to watch his ass. He was also sure that Ken would agree with his plan to do an unauthorized recon, to figure out where the fuck he is, and it was surprisingly easy. Too easy to break out of the room they locked him into every night, to avoid the nurses and soldiers wandering through the corridors, to find an access hatch, break in, begin the long climb up. Or maybe it was just that he was so different now that hard things weren't hard anymore.

His laughter echoed back to him, rang up and down, and when it hit his ears again it sounded harsh, inhuman.

A long climb and he wasn't even winded when he reached the top, didn't have to strain as he pushed the heavy cover off. The air was fresh and cool, and for a moment all Joe did was breathe. There was sunshine on his face -- not much, and weak, morning light. He looked up at the sky ( _bruised pink_ ), took in the dull shadows that slowly resolved themselves into the edges of a crater.

He still wasn't winded when he crested the lip, and it annoyed Joe for some inexplicable reason. The sunlight was brighter here, the sky more blue. Joe had to shade his eyes to see, and when he looked, he started to laugh again, quietly at first, then louder, longer, insane laughter as he realized that he hadn't a clue as to where he was -- had no way to get to where he wanted to be either. Ocean stretched before him, endless ocean, and the land below him was barren, rocky, spotted here and there with stubby bushes and stunted trees and not a single sign of human habitation.

"Of course," Joe said, voice high with the giddy despair that had filled his laughter. "Of course. You wouldn't keep a secret laboratory where you perform unholy experiments and raise the dead in the middle of a bustling metropolis, would you?" He sat down, suddenly, and as if he were still something human exhaustion slammed into him. "God, Ken. What am I going to do?"

But Ken didn't answer him.

*

Joe had never fully appreciated the complexity of the human body until the day he threw out his back because he twisted his knee during an unauthorized recon, landing badly when he dropped down from a ventilation shaft. Of course, he hadn't told anybody about it because that would have led to probing questions along the lines of "and just why were you poking around in the first place, hmm?" and he wasn't about to tell them that he'd been searching for a way off this godforsaken rock. He hadn't even really thought about it either, ignoring the twinges of pain like he always had, the constant ache when he ran, the stiffness in his lower back (like a brick on end, driving into his floating ribs with each step), because the only pain that mattered now was the one that told him when his energy was running out.

And of course it had to happen while he was jerking off, trying to recapture some of his lost humanity, trying to feel like anything other than a monster except even in this act he felt a little monstrous because he still called out Ken's name as he came, and he was enough of himself now to know just how wrong that really was. But there had been so much distance at the start, and just having Ken's name had been so comforting ( _wouldn't have been if I'd remembered who the fuck he was, not like this anyway_ ) and somewhere between the waking and now, sometime during those confused days when he'd been lost between the cracks of his life, he'd formed an attachment to Ken that --

Well, Joe didn't want to call it love. And he _definitely_ didn't want to call it need. And yet, that was what he felt, no matter how he tried to deny it.

And somewhere in that same time, he'd stopped picturing just women when he jerked off, started seeing more and more of Ken until, now, that was all he saw, all he felt, the burning heat of Ken's hands on his body as they fought, wrestled, strove against each other. Intimacy in violence ( _'course I go for the violent ones_ ) and it made so much sense that Joe wondered why he'd never seen this before now, wondered at the perspective death and rebirth had given him.

He smiled -- smirked, really -- at the thought of what he'd say to Ken, how he'd debrief, whether he'd tap dance around the subject or just come out and say it and deal with the fallout. And when he came, teasing himself with imagining pushing Ken up against a wall, kissing him into startled acquiescence, fighting him every step of the way for dominance in this new dimension he would add to their relationship, he arched his back and lifted his hips, thrusting up into his hand, growling Ken's name in a long, rumbling, sustained glissando, and something went _ping_ deep inside and.

He couldn't move. He couldn't feel his legs, his feet, his hips, his waist. Couldn't feel the rush of pleasure that came with his release, and first he was annoyed. Really annoyed. Pissed off, even, at the denial of this one pleasure he had left.

Then, as the ramifications of what this meant settled in, he was scared.

He pushed himself off of the bed, pulled himself over to the door, suddenly wishing he'd left one or two of those little spy devices intact.

He was thwarted by the door, at a loss as to how to get it open without the leverage -- hell, without even being able to reach the handle. Such a weak position and he couldn't even tear the fucking door off it's hinges, so he settled for pounding on it instead, and shouting, "Hey! Hey!"

Finally, slowly, it opened, and Joe glared up at the nurse who looked down at him with an impassive face.

 _Of course it's Ratchett_ , he thought, because Fate hated him and would send him that evil bitch of a nurse to see him crawling on the floor and smelling like sex. Still, better her than one of the younger, prettier nurses, who flirted outrageously with him; at least Ratchett could be counted on to be discreet.

"What happened," she asked, all business.

"I don't know. My back went out." He shifted, and pain lanced up and down his body, pain like he was being broken in half, pain that made him ill; he swore, squeezed his eyes tight, bit his tongue by accident. "Get the doc. Get Rafael. _O Dio, Dio, aiutilo Zio, io stanno morendo_."

He shifted again, trying to relieve the pressure, and it felt like he was being shredded from the inside. He managed not to scream while they carried him to an OR, managed not to swear loudly and profoundly while they gave him a local, cut him open, fixed whatever it was that was wrong.

When he got feeling back in his feet, they felt heavy, like lead, like they had the first few awkward days, and all he really wanted to do was get up and run, swim, remind this body that it was his, that it had to obey. But like so many things that he wanted ( _see the world again, live again_ ) that, too, was to be denied to him, at least for some time, strapped down as he was to a gurney so that he couldn't undo whatever it was that had been done.

"Well, you really did it this time -- snapped off one of the screws we put in your sacrum and completely severed the spinal column between the L3 and L4 vertebrae. You're lucky that it happened here, where we could help you." There was disapproval in Rafael's voice, and Joe didn't bother to look up. "So, do you want to tell me how this happened?"

"Dunno," Joe muttered. "Twisted my knee pretty bad awhile back -- guess it was worse than I thought."

The silence was almost oppressive and after at time Joe heard the doc sigh, felt the slight pressure of a hand on his head. "You're still human, Giorgio," Rafael said, and for once Joe didn't correct him. "No matter what you might think, you're still frail. You can still break."

Joe found the words oddly comforting.

*

He didn't know how he knew. He'd never known how he knew. Maybe it was because of the things in his blood, or a side effect of the bracelet; or maybe it was just that they were his family, and that was all the connection they needed.

Not that it really mattered why, or how.

They were in trouble.

They needed him.

And the goddamn doctor was just sitting there, with that damn bird of his, completely impervious to Joe's ranting.

"Let me go," he growled, low, threatening, feeling more like the Condor now than Joe; more like the man he'd been before he awoke here.

"You're not ready."

"Don't fucking care." The table beneath his hands creaked ominously, the metal whining under the onslaught of his rage. "I'm going, even if I have to fucking swim there."

"You don't know where they are."

"I can find them."

"Fine," Rafael said, after a pause that was probably not as long as Joe thought it was, nor as tense as it had seemed. The keys made a loud ringing sound when they hit the desk. "But be careful. If you run out of energy -- "

"Yeah, whatever." A flip farewell, said as he was running out the door, and the feeling of euphoria ( _going to see them, goingto seethem, goingtoseethem_ ) was almost like being drunk, being high. It felt so good to be in action again, to be fighting again. To be _doing_ something, at last, and he hadn't realized just how useless he'd felt up until now.

He managed to hold onto that feeling up until he saw them, with somebody else in his place.

It hurt more than he thought it would, hurt like a knife in his belly, like a hand ripping out his heart. Hurt like betrayal ( _jealousy_ ) and it was stupid to feel betrayed. It wasn't like there weren't hundreds of guys waiting in the wings, beta teams, delta teams, all cut from the same cloth as the rest of them, all desperate to be warriors. To be heroes. He should have known they'd find a replacement for him -- had known that he could be replaced.

He probably shouldn't have been quite so happy when it turned out the new guy was a Galactor plant.

He _really_ shouldn't have been quite so happy about the fact that he got to kill the bastard; shouldn't have been happy about the terror in the guy's eyes; shouldn't have teased him so, like a cat with a mouse.

"You're dead," the guy stammered, weasel-like features contorted in fear, backing away on shaking legs. "We killed you."

Joe grinned, leaned in close, whispered, "Run."

He let the bastard get a good ten feet down the corridor before he moved, outpaced the guy easily -- even had enough time to slouch up against the wall. "Too slow," he said, as he moved in for the kill, stalking forward, a tiger prowling.

"No. Please." The guy threw his hands up in futile defense. "Please! Have mercy!"

"There's no such thing."

He made the kill up close and personal -- wanted to see the light fading from those beady little eyes, wanted to feel the death. Made it messy too, slid his shuriken into the soft flesh of the throat just deep enough to let the poison ( _one of the nastier ones, from some snake or something_ ) do its slow work.

"Monster," the dead man whispered just before he broke his own back with his death spasms. Joe let his body fall, and the euphoria that had been returning fled. He felt cold, afraid. The sudden sound of boots heading towards him made him start, break out into a cold sweat.

He swarmed up an access ladder, out into the sunshine, stumbled away to some bushes. Vomited.

He was still shaking when he stopped, rocked back onto his heels. He pulled his helmet off, took deep gulps of fresh air.

It wasn't like this, before. He didn't mind the deaths, then, hadn't gotten sick over being called a monster, a bastard -- but then again, he'd never had an enemy live long enough to curse his name with a dying breath.

He'd never dragged out death before, never tortured a man.

"Fuck, Ken, they brought me back wrong." He laughed, mostly to himself. "Bastard was right. I'm Frankenstein's monster."

He'd been such an idiot. Such a fucking idiot. "Always rushing in without thinking, right Ken? Like you guys want some freak like me back. Probably better if I just stay away, huh?"

He pushed himself up then almost fell as blackness edged his vision and the world tried to convince him he was standing on the sky. He grabbed onto the trunk of a tree, held tight until the world righted itself. He was running out of juice and if that wasn't enough of a sign for Joe to just leave, then he didn't know what would be.

"Sorry guys. Guess Hakase was right." Joe stooped, carefully, to grab his helmet and when he straightened up, the world was exploding. He stared, open mouthed, at the battle that raged ahead of him, beautiful for all its deadliness -- because of its deadliness -- and he knew, suddenly, why everybody loved them. Davids against a Goliath, shining bright in the sun.

It was almost enough to make him reconsider, because he wanted to be over there so bad, wanted to behind the wheel of his car, wanted to be a part of that fight instead of stuck here on the ground. He took a step and the world flipped on him again, mechanical body protesting. He clenched his jaw, forced his legs to carry him away from the battle, forced himself to ignore the war in the sky, the war on the ground, but nothing could make him ignore the whine of a plane spinning out of control, the flash of sunlight overhead as G-1 screamed past, leaking smoke and trailing fire.

 _No, god, Ken._

He ran, stumbling, ungraceful, toward the crash, forcing his body to move.

"Ken!" The smoke was thick, foul. Joe coughed, jumped onto the G-1's wing, stared down into the cockpit. Ken was so still, and Joe imagined the worst until he heard a low moan, saw Ken twitch. "Oh God. Ken, wake up. Please, you've gotta wake up. You've gotta open up the top, Ken, I can't reach you."

"Joe?"

"Yeah, Ken, listen to me. You gotta pop the top, okay?"

"Can't. Stuck." Joe watched Ken shake his head slowly, watched him fade. "Sorry."

"Fuck, no, you're not dying on me, got that?" The glass was hot to the touch, the smoke thicker, and Joe wasn't sure if he was crying or sweating. He slammed his hands against the cockpit cover, again and again, used every ounce of his strength to shatter it. Reached in. Grunted as he hauled Ken up, as he staggered away from the wreckage. He fell near the mouth of a cave, too tired to move, forced himself to keep going, deeper into the shadows, to pull Ken's helmet off, still talking to him, babbling, incoherent.

"They don't let you rest even if you die, you know, probably cost so damn much to make us that they want to make sure they get their money's worth, and it's a fucking pain in the ass to come back. Trust me, I know. It's worse than the stuff Nambu put us through, and your skin doesn't feel right, like it's too tight, and they've got this chair, and they strap you in it and -- "

"Joe."

Joe blinked, took a gulping breath. "Yeah."

Ken smiled up at him, pure, unguarded joy on his face. "'S really you. You're really here."

"Yeah Ken. I'm here."

"Not dead."

"Nah. Promised we'd go together, didn't we? Just took a little vacation's all." Bluffing, giddy, afraid, so powerfully afraid. Not of Ken dying, not anymore, but of Ken knowing, seeing past the act, past the fake skin, past the sad attempt to pretend he hadn't changed, that he was the same man. The same brother.

That he hadn't spent the last couple of months beating off while imagining all the ways he could make Ken groan, what his skin would taste like, how they'd fight while they fucked, how Ken's lips would look ( _red, so red_ ) wrapped around his cock; how his eyes would look ( _blue like bruises, like frostbite_ ) looking up at him through the tangle of his hair. That he hadn't violated their trust every night. That he was like the rest of them, still on the same side of that line -- the one that kept Ken and Jun apart, the one that allowed only so much and no more -- and not an ocean away on the other side and planning a surgical strike to go back over and pull Ken into the deep sea with him.

"Good. Need you. Not right." Ken reached out, his eyes rolling up even as he did so, and Joe grabbed his hand, sudden panic flaring in his chest. He bent down low, held his breath until he felt the soft brush of Ken's across his cheek. He bent down further, slid down until he lay alongside Ken, exhausted, faint. He let his hand tangle in Ken's hair, wished he could feel it slide along his skin, but too tired to detrans.

"God, Ken, _caro mio_ , I miss you so damn much," he whispered, mouth close to Ken's ear, daring in his cowardice. " _Mi manchi, mi manchi. Ti penso sempre. Ah, il mio angelo, ti amo._ "

His head was spinning, and so was the world, except they were moving in opposite directions. Joe closed his eyes, swallowed hard, and the darkness helped a little. He lay still, listened to the steady sound of Ken's breathing, felt the heat, the weight of Ken's hand in his. He drifted, mostly unconscious, even though he knew that the others would be here soon, knew that he didn't want to be found -- couldn't be found.

Gravel crunching underfoot made him open his eyes, try to push himself up. He managed to flip himself over, and even that small movement cost him more than he wanted to admit. But it was a single pair of boots approaching, not three, and it wasn't Galactor's style to hang around the site of their defeat, so he had a smile ready when Rafael bent over him.

" _Ciao Zio_ ," he said. "You'll have to forgive me if I don't get up."

"I told you you weren't ready." Rafael looked blandly down at Ken's slack face, turned his attention back to Joe. "So that's Ken, hmm? Different from his pictures."

" _Zio_ , I think he's hurt." Joe blinked, tried to make the two images of Rafael become one.

"He'll be fine. And you?"

"Can't move."

"Che. Ran out of energy, just like I knew you would." Rafael knelt down beside him, put a hand on his chest. "Ah. That low, eh? I'm surprised you're still conscious." He glanced toward the mouth of the cave, a bright white hole that contrasted so sharply with the gloom inside. "The other Ninjatai will be here soon. What do you want me to do?"

"They can't see me."

"Oh? But I thought this was what you wanted. I thought you wanted to be with your friends."

"I'm not...like them anymore." Joe tried to turn his head to look at Ken, but he was too weak for even that. "I'm not one of them."

"No," Rafael said. "You're not." He stood, slowly, and dusted off his pants. "Well. It's good you realize this." He reached down, pulled Joe upright, half-carried, half-dragged him deeper into the cave. "You're meant for something bigger, you were meant to destroy Galactor once and for all."

"Yeah, sure." ( _so tired_ )

He felt Rafael stop, felt his body being lowered gently to the ground. There was sand on the floor here, and it was cool and rough against his cheek. He breathed deeply, slowly, and tried to remember if he'd ever been told what would happen to him if he became completely drained. Would he die? Slip into a coma? Or would it be more of the same -- trapped in his body and completely conscious.

Time dragged on, and eventually he heard the others arrive, Ryu's booming bass underlying Jinpei's piping soprano ( _brat's balls still haven't dropped_ ) and Joe forced himself to stay quiet, forced himself to listen to Rafael tap-dance his way around the truth.

"Joe?" Ken's voice, rough from the smoke he'd inhaled, and Joe bit his tongue at how hopeful he sounded. A pause. Quiet murmuring from Rafael, and then Ken's voice drifted back to him again. "I see. It was just a hallucination."

A longer pause, and when Ken spoke again, he sounded so wistful. "It just...seemed so real, is all."

Joe squeezed his eyes tight against the sudden pain in his heart ( _I'm sorry, Ken, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, 'msorry, forgive me, please, please_ ), hoped to all hell that it was just his body breaking down.


End file.
